Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Monday August 04, 2014 @07:37PM
from the end-of-line dept.

Nate the greatest (2261802) writes Sony has decided to follow up closing its ebook stores in the U.S. and Europe by getting out of the consumer ebook reader market entirely. (Yes, Sony was still making ereaders.) The current model (the Sony Reader PRS-T3) will be sold until stock runs out, and Sony won't be releasing a new model. This is a sad end for what used to be a pioneering company. This gadget maker might not have made the first ebook reader but it was the first to use the paper-like E-ink screen. Having launched the Sony Librie in 2004, Sony literally invented the modern ebook reader and it then went on to release the only 7" models to grace the market as well as the first ereader to combine a touchscreen and frontlight (the Sony Reader PRS-700). Unfortunately Sony couldn't come up with software or an ebook retail site which matched their hardware genius, so even though Sony released amazing hardware it had been losing ground to Amazon, B&N, and other retailers ever since the Kindle launched in 2007.

I think not, because of the bad precedent in the music industry. Sony bought CBS Music for $2BN (a huge acquisition back then!) in 1987 when they were riding high on the Walkman and Discman, thus owning the catalogue of Michael Jackson among many others. Sony was ideally positioned to dominate portable music, forever. Where is it now?

Likewise I look at my Clie TH55 [amazon.com] and see today's Mobile devices, 10 years ago. And where is Sony now?

No. They did what they always do, and tried to push a proprietary format (Minidisc and ATRAC) instead of embracing an established standard. With their music catalog, they could have *owned* the MP3 player market like they did with the original Walkman. (add to that their movie catalog and they could have killed the iPod touch before it was even born.)

Exactly. I've had friends with Sony readers and I wasted many days over the years trying to get those things to work right. The quality of the hardware was always good. It was the same, tired, mistake that Sony always did. Their software SUCKED to the point where using it was almost pointless.

The client-side software on the PC barely (if ever) worked right. USB conflicts all over the place. Their DRM-laden eBooks was monstrous to work with. I have zero sympathy for Sony in this area. When they tried to compete with the iPod, their ATRAC-format, and software also seriously sucked back then too.

Sony had their chance. They deserve to simply die and be buried. Another once-great company put out of its misery.

I thought Sony had learned their lesson after losing completely and utterly to VHS. Most would agree Betamax was a superior product, technically speaking, but being the 'better' product is no guarantee of success - pricing and marketing are critical. They priced themselves out of existence.

Blu-ray was a much better roll-out. They enlisted major studios before the product hit the market. Licensed it to many other companies. And the pricing - while still not making most happy - is keeping them in the

I had a pair of the Sony eReaders. They were great - insane battery life, excellent controls. And no stupid touch-screen - like any sane person wants fingerprints on their reading surface?

A sane person would notice that you can't even see fingerprints on most modern displays in most lighting, especially the matte surface used on competent e-Book readers. Meanwhile, touch support makes the interface vastly better. I'm extra glad I didn't buy a Sony reader now. What crap.

No. They did what they always do, and tried to push a proprietary format (Minidisc and ATRAC) instead of embracing an established standard.

MiniDisc wasn't the problem. It was a great replacement for cassettes (even if Sony and retailers initially made the mistake of pushing it as a competitor to the CD). Random access track playback, track names, high-fidelity recording on Walkman-sized devices, random access editing without a razor blade: MiniDisc OWNED tape in oh so many ways. The ATRAC format was a logical choice for MiniDisc since the format had to be writable (not just readable) by the sort of portable hardware available back when MiniDisc first came out.

One of the Sony's big problems was their embrace of copy protection and DRM and the philosophy behind it. And this appears to have started when they bought out the CBS/Columbia record and movie studio operations around the time of the DAT fight. Technology like the Triniton CRT and the Walkman were about adding value for customers, while DRM is always about subtracting it.

With MiniDisc, Sony did things like bringing out MiniDisc "recorders" that had no microphone or line in jacks, only the ability to "record" over a DRMed USB connection. I guess they thought these were competitors for MP3 players and iPods. It took a long time for high-capacity MiniDiscs to arrive and in the meantime, Sony tried to push low-bitrate recording modes that were not always the greatest for sound quality.

This exactly! Minidisc, for the time, was fantastic. But the silly DRM on it made it overly annoying. I remember the PC software had "library" counts, where you'd "check out" tracks to media, and had to check them in before you could move them somewhere else. Making multiple MDs with the same son? Impossible on their software. You had this device that could read, write, store songs with removable storage that sounded good, and packaged in a small fairly indestructable case--then crippled it with DRM to the

It was a great replacement for cassettes (even if Sony and retailers initially made the mistake of pushing it as a competitor to the CD).

They were a great replacement for CDs for audiobooks. The CD is diabolical for audiobooks... Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series is 144 hours long, on audiobook, which makes CDs a little impractical.

Oh, wait. I'm being told that's exactly what they did. They sold their music in a format unsupported by any other portable player. And the first ipods only worked with Macs which, at the time, had a tiny percentage of the personal computer market.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say Sony's choice of format had nothing to do with their inability to corner the new portable audio market.

I get what you are saying, entirely, but doesn't slashdot pedantry require I ask if it was really a 'proprietary database'? I thought it was a piece of xml? I'm pretty sure it is on the computer, but no idea what the file is on the iPod.

Minidisc and ATRAC pre-date MP3 as a format (1992 v 1995), so of course they didn't use the MP3 standard. Sony released MP3 players in the 90s, and while the software did indeed suck, it wasn't because of DRM. It didn't allow you to copy from MP3 player to computer, but that's not really a thing people want to do.

Anyway, the idea that they could leverage their movie holdings counters the idea that using an established standard as a format would have helped them. If they have large holdings, the only way

It didn't allow you to copy from MP3 player to computer, but that's not really a thing people want to do.

Of course people want to do that. During the iPod craze, it was quite common for someone, upon seeing that his friend had a large collection on their portable device, to ask if they could could copy the music from the iPod to their own computer.

No. They did what they always do, and tried to push a proprietary format (Minidisc and ATRAC) instead of embracing an established standard.

It's worse than that; the MiniDisc came out long before the MP3 *was* established as the standard. (*) As I commented a while back [slashdot.org], had Sony used the underlying technology of MiniDisc to its full potential and enabled the free exchange of "tracks"- in effect, ATRAC files (**)- when it came out in 1992, those may well have become the preferred format for exchanging music when the file format moved beyond the original devices.

Instead, Sony not only didn't permit that, but they intentionally hobbled MiniDisc

That fell apart because Sony didn't anticipate what direction things would take, letting Apple overtake them along with just about everyone else.

I don't think that's quite right. Sony did anticipate the direction things were going take, they just tried to control it too tightly and had an overinflated idea of their own power to steer things.
I think the Sony Network Walkman [wikipedia.org] predates the iPod. I had an NW-MS9 [google.com.au] and I think in many ways it (and the earlier versions) were ahead of their time. Tiny, digital, sleek, even the name "Network" hints and some anticipation of a future of medialess distribution.

However they utterly ballsed up the execution. Partly on the software side (the associated software was an absolute dog which seemed to go out of it's way to make things painful) but mostly because they were trying to own the future with their MagicGate DRM (which they even seemed to be trying to sell as something exciting for the consumer, though it was responsible for much of the pain in using the software) and codec restrictions.

Sony saw the future, they just wanted to own it and in trying to do so produced something that served them more than it served the buyer.

Sony gotten bitten with Apple Envy. They pretty much invented portable music with the Walkman, re-invented it with the Discman but completely failed to capitalize it with digital music the way the iPod & iTunes did.

Their downfall was trying to sucker the rest of the world with proprietary formats.

Without even looking at this thing I bet its the exact same fails that Sony always pulls, proprietary formats, making everything go through Sony, overpriced hardware...correct?

Sony has been throwing away killer tech products going all the way back to the Minidisc, which at the time had several orders of magnitude more storage than any MP3 player could muster but because Sony tried to lock everything down to the 50th power so that all discs would go through or from Sony nobody would support or put out conten

That's why companies like Xiaomi (which recently rose to be the 5th largest phone maker in the world) can offer a very capable Android phone that has no Google software on it.

while Xiaomi does sell phones with MIUI those are incompatible forks of Android and often end up with google play services installed as that proprietary blob is required for many Android applications to work.

Android is open source and freely available to any manufacturer who wants to use and/or customize it.

Windows is the same, no OEM ever needed to ship Windows systems with IE as the default browser.

Google Services are useful enough that most people want them on their phones, but that doesn't preclude any other manufacturer from making very successful phones without them, as Xiaomi has demonstrated.

Google Services are necessary enough that most people need them on their phones, much like IE6 has been necessary for a long time even though nothing ever precluded any OEM from making very successful PCs without it. The google service binary blob is where all the new innovative functionality goes, not into AOSP, so devices without it are becoming less and less compatible.

I have a kindle fire tablet it runs Android with exactly zero google services.

The real problem is you cant just make decent hardware and expect it to sell. The same issue exists with the slew of Android tablets out there, sure there is decent hardware and an operating system but theres not much you can do with them beyond web browsing (which historically hasnt been that great, especially the flagship Nexus 7, maybe they fixed that in the 2013 version) as there is very little in the way of useful tablet applications for them so you get the crappy experience of up-scaled phone applicat

Unfortunately that is pretty much an apt description of everything Sony has made in the past 2 decades or so, really slick hardware with crap software and frustrating incompatibilities. They either need to just do a clean sweep of their software division or else just become a hardware design consulting company.

Sony products fro the early 90s to the late 2000s had two defining qualities:- they were loaded with proprietary cr*p. Sony suffered the worst case of NIH ever. They had to have their own everything, from music compression to memory cards. This cost them a bundle in engineering, wasted time reinventing the wheel, and made for subpar products because the customers had to buy expensive gadgets that wouldn't be any use with anything else or had to be transcoded or whatever.- they were infected with DRM schemes. From the VHS experience they seem to have got the idea that they _had_ to have the content providers on board, plus for a while they had their own music and films studios. Again this made for subpar customer experience.

And also, like you said, their software was just bad.

The result of that is that they missed out on just about every category of electronic gizmo that hit the market in that time period. Phones, mp3 player, organizers, laptops, tablets, you name it.

With the image and brand recognition they had, they should have been Apple. The rest is history.

They had to have their own everything, from music compression to memory cards.

I believe they even had their own non *HCI compliant USB controller for a very brief while as well. That thing NEVER worked properly on any operating system. Pointless stupid proprietaryness for shits and grins.

As for DRM it was their fault. They massively hobbled the minidisc with DRM and that inspired them to do all sorts of stupid shit like makeing it pointlessly limited, hobbling the few computer based drives.

They still have the Sony DPT-S1 [sony.com], a large format reader intended for the legal and other professional markets. Costly as heck though.

It's a pity they're exiting the business. I much preferred the Sony devices to the Kindle both for the build quality and for its flexibility about formats, which is a must if you provide most of your own reading material instead of purchasing it through Amazon or the Sony ebook store. The remaining alternatives to the Kindle (Kobo and various janky Chinese and Russian devices) routinely fall short in one or the other. For example, the Kobo doesn't have PDF reflow.

Sad indeed. Sony should have learned something from their console business. It isn't so much the console as the games, it isn't so much the ereader as the ebooks. Now it seems their smartphone business is also going dodo.

However I'm curious about this part of your post: "The remaining alternatives to the Kindle (Kobo and various janky Chinese and Russian devices) routinely fall short". Does Russia really manufacture anything besides spyware, rockets, and killing machines?

The device was great, but no one really buys a Kindle for the device. They buy it for convenience and content. The Sony ebook store had a terrible selection. Worse, you had to buy it on the computer and transfer it to your device. Nirvana is achieved when you can pick up your ereader, decide you want a book, and can complete the selection and sale immediately. That's why Amazon was willing to eat the cost of the cell subscriptions, because it meant people could complete a purchase when they wanted, not when

My PRS-505 was great, it was a nice metal case, and it survived in my house where 3 Kindles met a cracked screen fate. Then its battery died and it is $30 for a new one.

But I could see from day one that the library that Sony was offering was pretty much an irrelevancy. I am not sure that a single book they ever offered (not that I looked more than once or twice) caught my interest. I long thought that Sony should have gone enterprise with a very large screen (close to 8 1/2 x 11 as possible) for reading l

I long thought that Sony should have gone enterprise with a very large screen (close to 8 1/2 x 11 as possible) for reading legal documents, documentation, and basically the size that every PDF is aimed at.

I always wanted to try one of those for sheet music. The Sony nameplate always put me off, though. I keep hoping someone else makes a large screen PDF reader for the musician market. If it could run Musescore, I'd pre-order.

Not a finished product. But this http://youtu.be/ldvk_jAGjQI?t=... [youtu.be] shows that there are other companies trying to make things with large e-ink screens.
I'm not sure about screens so large but I have a 9.7 inch e-ink reader and I love it.

I was very pleased with my 505, as well. I didn't bother with their software (I think it was Windows-only and was mainly used to buy DRM-encumbered stuff from their own store) but just using it as USB mass storage worked well enough for my purposes.

I use it primarily for reading stuff from Project Gutenberg (since there is no DRM insanity) or taking other miscellaneous PDF and text content with me. The screen was quite good and sure beat reading any amount of text off of a glowing screen.

It is too bad that they are leaving the market but I can tell my use-cases aren't those used by the masses so I am not too surprised.

That's exactly what I did with our 505! My wife had it for just about a year and then wanted a Kindle so I loaded it up with about two dozen public domain books. It worked very well, and for my train ride into NYC was perfect because the battery life was adequate and the screen was non-glare and nigh indestructible no matter who hit it/pushed into me/knocked my bag. Heck, I fell asleep several times and dropped the thing hard. It didn't care.

These devices cry out to be made by casino and found in ever gas station for $5.The Kindle with the keyboard pretty much perfected the device. It'd be nice if they got color figured out but I don't think anyone wants any more out of these devices. ok ok, put a solar cell on the back or something so you never have to charge it.

Having owned both the kindle with the keyboard, and the paperwhite, the keyboard had lots of issues. The keyboard wasted a ton of space despite being virtually never used, and the lighting solutions, while functional, could have looked better, and were not that battery efficient.

I think my ideal kindle would be the Paperwhite, but with physical page turn buttons.

I'm kind of sad to see these devices fall off the market, though I can't say I didn't see it coming. They closed their "Sony Reader Store" for ebooks on the 20th of March, and sent another email detailing how to switch to Kobo. I've had a PRS-T1 for years now, and I love it. It's got a super nice feature where you could long-press a word you don't know and it would show you its meaning on its internal dictionary, or you could try searching google and wikipedia for it (if you were connected to wifi). It's so handy that when I switch back to regular books after a couple sessions with my ereader, I find myself trying to look up words in regular books by putting my finger on them. With the wifi off (or set to standby), the device supposedly will go for a month of regular (read: three or four hours daily) use. Never tested it, but boy it was nice, especially in an era of charge-nightly smartphones.

By far the best feature was that my PRS-T1 seems to be perfectly sized for my hand. I can hold it in my left hand and swipe the screen (to change pages) with my thumb, comfortably. Combined with the fact that it only weighs a couple of ounces, and it's actually possible to do extremely comfortable one-handed reading. I should go plug in the thing. And find more books for it. And read more.

I love my PRS-T1 too, but sadly the dictionary app got grundled and if I accidentally activate it the unit freezes and needs to be rebooted.

It would be great if Sony could unlock these readers to allow us to add different reader apps. There are a few hack instructions on the web but they seem to apply to specific regional versions, so I don't want to brick the thing entirely by taking the risk.

The main issue with putting a standard Android app on the T1 appears to be getting its display mode modified to re

I liked my PRS-500. I thought it was a decent device, with so-so software. I didn't use it much after the first month or so. Then I got a Kindle. It more than doubled my daily reading and I still carry it always with me, several years later. In retrospect, I realized that I liked the PRS-500 just because it had the first good display I had seen for reading, but the software implementation, both on the device and the PC/store part were the bare minimum to make an "ebook reader" type device. I saw that some PRS-500/505 users gave it a little more life with Calibre later on, but that was not thanks to Sony. So I don't know about "hardware genius", was it perhaps before serious competitors started coming with devices which were at least on-par hardware-wise but had some brilliant ideas and software behind them?

Minindisc was awesome, it only failed outside Asia because in Europe and America, where generally cheaper products were the norm, people started ripping mp3s to CDR en-masse before MD players were cheap enough for mass market.

The Clie was good, if a little fiddly. I knew a few people with those. Where *that* failed was sony's protectionis hogging of the Palm OS and getting usurped by Symbian and then Microsoft on smartphones until Apple took over the world.

does sony discontinuing a done product line mean the end of a pioneering company?

Sony hasn't pioneered anything since the CD, which Philips had to help them with. Everything else they've done has been biting someone else's shit. MOs [slashdot.org] were around before Minidisc. (IBM made the Cell, too; that was not produced on spec for Sony.)

Sony tries too hard to be completely in charge of every tiny aspect of their products, even when they lack the expertise to actually accomplish it.They could have partnered with Amazon or B&N right from the beginning, and they would have been a part of something big. But instead they have a tiny part of nothing, all to themselves.

This is what happens when you don't share your toys Sony. Everyone eventually decides to get up and go play somewhere else.

In the 80's Sony was the gold standard for anything electronic. By the 90's they started living off their name and selling poorly made crap at a premium price. By the 2000's that started catching up to them.

I have the Sony PRS-T2 and it was really good for its time. However, Sony really fluffed PRS-T3 by not having a front light.

However, I think rather than Sony's hardware, it was the software that was better, esp for pdf in this generation. Kobo hardware was better - the aura and aura hd are one step ahead of kindles in hardware but one step behind everyone else.

Finally Sony was the only one with actual buttons. I was really hoping Sony would bring a new reader with frontlight and page turn buttons.

Sometimes it seems like the people on this site have a reflex hatred of anything digital that simply bypasses rational thought or reading comprehension. Even a small amount of investigation would have shown you that:

-Sony e-readers already in existence won't stop working or lose access to the books that the owners have already downloaded.-It's trivially easy to put books from sources other than Sony on their e-reader. PDF's, epubs, etc. aren't going anywhere.-Even if someone did buy books from Sony, their

Sometimes people on this site seem to have an instinctual fan-boy reflex that by-passes rational thought. Even a small amount of thought would point out:

-The Sony eReaders will die eventually - Bye-bye books for most people who aren't sophisticated enough to transfer to other formats and devices.-DRM will prevent a lot of people, the majority of people, from accessing their documents. bye-bye books!

It would be really nice if fan-boys or stooges and plants for Sony didn't spread misinformation.

Had a PRS-505, now have a PRS-T1, never used the Sony store after the original registration. All my content is in epub, pdf, rtf, etc. all acquired from places like baenebooks.com kobo.com and my public library. Get Calibre to use as your ebook library software and it will manage your books on your computer and your Sony PRS-T3. The biggest advantage to the Sony Readers that no one mentions is the ability to sort by more than the title of the books, When you have 500+ books on the Reader, it is nice to be a

Not sure now, but a few years ago the Sony reader had less restrictions than most (if that's what you're implying) - since it was able to read multiple formats, and no DRM requirements, i made it my choice, and we have 3 of them (different generations) in the house now. Will miss future iterations!

I have a PRS-T1. I've never bought anything from Sony's store (it only existed in the UK for a bit over two years, compared with the eight or so in the US!). To my knowledge, the device supports ADEPT only, and once the content is decrypted once it is forever accessible on that device unless you revoke it (there is no online checking). So, uh, at least content already readable will remain as such on devices already authorised.

Also note that ADEPT has long been broken (it's got a good cryptographic basis, bu

Sony's strong push for DRM on everything from VHS to DAT to DVD to BluRay to Memory Stick has made me a Sony hater forever. They have lobbied for every industry restriction on fair use they can, and their campaign donations [opensecrets.org] have funded congressional campaigns to advance their anti-fair-use agenda. I stopped buying their products in the 1990s, and I dropped my last aged Sony appliance off at the recycle center just a few weekends ago (a VCR that had been cluttering up the basement.) I can easily survive t

The Sony Reader PRS-T1 is pretty great, easily rooted and runs Android. Every further successive version Sony locked the device down further and further - with minimal hardware upgrades... Thus the T1 is the better choice: cheaper and more functional than the T2 or T3.

I actually tested a couple of ereaders back in the dawn of the e-ink versions for educational use, including the Sony ones.

They sucked. Utterly sucked. Equation formatting was laughably bad. Footnoting was dismal. Diagrams/graphs/pictures were far too small to see and magnify worked poorly (and of course there was no color). Writing text notes was a pain, and bookmarking was far too slow compared to page flipping. PDFs didn't format/reflow/do much of anything right.

It's not all that much better today. I love my Kindle, but I read novels and the like on it. Professional reading is almost always paper text. I've done e-textbooks on an iPad which handles equations and diagrams better, but it's still clunky compared to paper.

I use one of the big Kindles for viewing PDFs, which gets around the formatting issue, but that's about it as far as serious usage goes. To be honest, Amazon's big innovation wasn't improving the experience, but realising that people would put up with it if it cost as much as a Game Boy.

For the uses you mention, I agree with you that the typical 6 inch readers are garbage. But larger e-ink displays can be quite nice for that use case if the software is good enough.
I have a 9.7 inch e-ink reader by Onyx and the hardware is pretty good. In that screen size many books with diagrams look nice and you can see a nice amount of information at once. Alas, the Onyx software is passable but could be much better. I wouldn't recomend this particular model for a demanding professional, but as I said ,

Turns out you need some decent CPU power for that sort of stuff so ereaders that can handle complex PDFs have only been coming out for the last couple of years - and they are still slow for some PDF files. They don't have the processing power of an iPad or the top end android tablets.

How is Amazon's hardware restrictive? The majority of the books on my Kindle are not from Amazon's store, and aren't.azw files (mostly.mobi, and a few pdfs). I mean, I understand that the Kindle won't support.epub, but I feel like there's a major difference between "doesn't support one particular popular format but does support most others" and "only supports one proprietary format." Besides, if you have an.epub without DRM it only takes a few seconds to convert it to a format that a Kindle can read.

The reason that sony is failing is that you can buy (or, in your terms, "rent") more content, more accessories, more apps, more of everything, and do so more conveniently, from competitors products. The device itself is not the failing; it is that the usefulness of the device is diminished by the relative lack of things to do with it, and the lack of ways to do so conveniently.

It matters not at all what you think of the big picture to answer the posed qu